Thanks to Apneaman for bringing my attention to a new blog by Tim Garrett.

Garrett is the most important and least recognized physicist in the world, having explained and quantified the relationship between energy consumption and economic wealth. You can find other work by Garrett that I’ve posted here.

This most recent essay provides a nice overview of Garrett’s theory and its implications.

Because the Gross World Product (GWP) exists, we grow, and then use our growth to access more energy which we can then consume with the higher infrastructure demands. The relevant equation is that every 1000 dollars of year 2005 inflation-adjusted gross world product requires 7.1 additional Watts of power capacity to be added, independent of the year that is considered.

Right now, energy consumption is continuing to grow rapidly, sustaining an ever larger GWP. But it is not the rate of energy consumption that supports the GWP, but the rate of growth of energy consumption that supports the GWP.

This important distinction is flat out frightening. The implication is that if we cease to grow energy and raw material consumption globally, then the global economy must collapse. But if don’t cease to grow energy consumption and raw material consumption then we still collapse due to climate change and environmental destruction. Is there no way out?

Currently Reading

Favorite Quotes

For explaining why humans are odd
To Varki and Brower we applaud
A great mystery they solved
With denial we evolved
And created the Higgs, overshoot, and God

Denial not only makes us believe in god, it is god, because denial created us, and denial may destroy us.

The human brain, the God it believes in, and the overshoot it enabled and denies, all resulted from the same improbable genetic adaptation that occurred about 100,000 years ago.

Denial is the reality that must be most aggressively denied to avoid collapsing the house of cards that keeps us functioning.

The most amazing thing about human overshoot is that we do not discuss it.

You know you are in trouble when reduced CO2 emissions from an economic collapse caused by low-cost oil depletion is not sufficient to prevent civilization collapse from climate change caused by previously emitted CO2.

Our only choices are do we want to fall from a higher elevation later, or climb down from a lower elevation sooner?

Things that can’t continue usually stop too late.

Truth is like poetry and most people hate poetry.

All 8 billion of us owe our existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact it rains; 6 billion of us also owe our existence to nitrogen fertilizer created from natural gas by Haber-Bosch factories.

While it digs its own grave, all the mind can do is entertain fantasies and create excuses.

When the only paying job in town is sawing off the branch which you are sitting on, you….saw away! You might refuse to saw and hang yourself from that branch, but the end is the same anyway, and that option is much less fun. (Cynic @Megacancer)

It is remarkable that a brain emerged from a cloud of hydrogen and figured out the laws of physics that governed, and possibly made inevitable, its own creation and destruction.

We have met the oblivious and they are us.

All 8 billion of us originated from one small tribe in Africa about 100,000 years ago that gave birth to a child with an improbable mutation for a more powerful brain that denied reality. The other tribes were soon toast and we took over the planet. We’re all close cousins. I love you all. Except the deniers.

Meaning comes from understanding why we can understand there is no meaning.

Way too many smart people with big reputations are wrong about everything that matters. Something’s gonna happen that gives them an excuse not to have to admit they were in denial.

One of the most, if not the most, precious and rare things in the universe is the human brain. We have a cosmic obligation to use it and to confirm it works.

Fire to cooking to intelligence to denial to god to plotting to capital punishment to self-domestication to Apollo 11 to 7 billion too many.